Sankar: The US failed to deter major conflicts over the past decade
Sham Sankar · How AI Is Changing Warfare | Palantir CTO · Invest Like The Best · Mar 10, 2026 · at 43:53
Shyam Sankar, CTO of Palantir, evaluates the strategic effectiveness of the U.S. military and its deterrence capabilities over recent history.
0:00 / 0:23exact quote · 23.9s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“If you look back over the last 10 years, we've not been able to deter a lot of conflict. We had the annexation of Crimea in 2014. The militarization of the Spratly Islands after they told President Obama, we will not militarize it. They militarized Spratly Islands. We've had a pogrom in Israel. We've had the invasion of Ukraine. We have unprecedented gray zone, phase zero operations by the Chinese in the South, South China Sea.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Sham Sankar
Sankar: The CCP Believes China Can Only Win if America Fails
“So, I think the challenge for us with the CCP Is that it's not enough for China to be prosperous. America must fail.”
Sankar: Chinese AI models are the result of model distillation
“And even the Chinese models, those are a result of distillation.”
Sankar: The best corporate cultures are almost cult-like and highly differentiated
“The best cultures are really almost cult-like. You know your culture is highly differentiated. It should actually kind of be hard for someone to inorganically insert into your culture, otherwise it's not a very differentiated culture whatsoever.”
Sankar: AI models are commoditized, forcing providers up-stack
“The model companies have to run up the stack away from just providing a pure model, because the model is commoditized. It's really everything they build around the model that is a solution that they're going to try to build value off of.”
Sankar: The US is in an undeclared emergency having lost deterrence
“I can't look my kids in the eye and not say that I'm ringing the bell that we're in an undeclared state of emergency. That really the first major public thing I put out there was the 18 theses, which is to say, like, we're an emergency. We've lost deterrence.”
Sankar: US military breakthroughs came exclusively from heretics, not bureaucracy
“Frankly, if you look back at history, the only shit that ever worked, the things that helped us win all the wars, were the things that the heretics actually did. Nothing that went through the machine delivered anything. I think all change comes from these here…”